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ANTHRO

This course explores the construction of gender in the Middle East. Drawing on the historical, sociological and anthropological research in the region, the course aims to question the stereotypes about the subordination of Muslim women and to offer students a systematic reading and analytical discussion of the political, economic and cultural structures that inform gender relations and practices in the region. The course starts with an examination of early Islam and religious sources with regard to women¿s status, then moves on to nationalist and modernization movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, and finally explores women¿s and men¿s lives in contemporary Egypt, Turkey and Iran. In this framework, we will pay special attention to Islamist mobilizations, family and sexual relations, as well as women's changing livelihoods and labor.

Last offered: Autumn 2014
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-SI

ANTHRO 182:An Anthropology of Annihilation: Tobacco at the Turn of the Millennium

The cigarette as the world's greatest weapon of mass destruction: 100 million dead worldwide from cigarettes during the 20th century, one billion expected to die in the 21st century. How to understand this toll, its production, management, politicization, and depoliticization? What can anthropological and allied perspectives disclose? How does the catastrophe challenge key precepts within anthropology and other branches of the academy?

This course examines the neglect and management of socially marginalized persons including the mentally ill, youth runaways, child wards of the state, drug addicts and prisoners. In this course, we will approach the concept of marginality by investigating the spaces and institutions of decay, neglect and rehabilitation to which unwanted and indigent individuals are relegated. Readings are focused on qualitative research conducted within institutions of health, welfare, and reform. There will be two comparative public mental health sections in this course: one focused on South Asia and the second on Africa. This course is relevant for students interested in medical anthropology, applied anthropology, public health policy, or clinical careers in medicine, psychology, or social work.

Last offered: Winter 2013

ANTHRO 182N:Smoke and Mirrors in Global Health

A few years ago, health experts began calling out tobacco as engendering a global health crisis, categorizing the cigarette as the world's greatest weapon of mass destruction. A "global health crisis"? What merits that title if not tobacco use? A hundred million people were killed by tobacco in the 20th century, and ten times that number ¿ a billion people ¿ are predicted to die prematurely from exposure to cigarette smoke over the next hundred years. How has tobacconcome to be labeled a global health crisis over the last decade and what has been the political response? From whence does activism and ongoing complacency regarding tobacco arise? How are they created in different cultural contexts?nnThis course aims to provide students conceptual tools to tackle two specific thought projects: (1) to understand how institutional actors compete to define a situation in the world today as a problem of global health, and (2) to understand the sociocultural means by which something highly dangerous to health such as the cigarette is made both politically contentious and inert. On both fronts, special attention will be given to the ways global health activism and complacency unfold in the U.S. and China.

What are the sexual politics of labor and capital? How is the global economy shaped by sex, love, and intimacy? This course will examine intimacy--gender, sexuality, kinship, and care-- as a lense for understanding and interrogating socio-political and economic systems from an anthropological perspective. By refusing the categorical separation of the private or domestic realm from the realm of politics, this course will critically interrogate the naturalization of particular intimate configurations (like the family, romantic couple, and domestic labor) in global contexts of colonialism, (neo)liberalism, and global capitalism. It will explore how domains of seemingly ¿private¿ sentiment and personal relations are connected to liberal and illiberal forms of power, inequality, exploitation and control, as well as to processes of incorporation, citizenship, and care. Finally, through selected ethnographic texts, this course will also look at the intimate as staging ground for social resistance, political refusal, economic ingenuity, and creativity.

2019-2020 Winter

ANTHRO 183B:Human Mobility and Adaptability (ANTHRO 283B)

Mobility, whether in the form of seasonal or permanent migration, is an ancient practice necessary for many subsistence strategies, including hunting-and-gathering and pastoralism. Many new forms of mobility have emerged and now it is nearly impossible to consider a patch of human society that is not engaged in or directly impacted by habitual, patterned geographic mobility. Today, almost everywhere in the world, people can get farther, faster; urbanization, environmental degradation, and civil unrest are driving groups of people who do not have a cultural tradition of nomadic migration to adopt a mobile lifestyle¿sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily¿in search of new economic or resource opportunities. In this seminar course, we will explore modern patterns of human mobility and migration as adaptive strategies for predictably and unpredictably changing environments. Using a framework of biological and cultural adaptation, we will discuss the major types of current human mobility (e.g. nomadism, immigration, migrant labor, displacement) and how they influence and are influenced by social systems, resource access, and health.

Last offered: Winter 2016

ANTHRO 184:Spirituality and Healing

The puzzle of symbolic healing. How have societies without the resources of modern medicine approached healing? Why do these rituals have common features around the world? Shamanism, spirit possession, prayer, and the role of placebos in modern biomedicine. Students do ethnographic work and practical explorations along with more traditional scholarly approaches to learning.

Last offered: Winter 2013
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci

ANTHRO 184A:Vital Curse: Oil As Culture

Rapidly-evolving technology draws increasing amounts of petroleum from the ground, while wars and friendly agreements move it around the globe, all to occasionally-disastrous result. Pronounced environmental concerns such as fracking, pipelines, plastics, climate change are nearly synonymous with the petroleum industry. And yet, oil is integral to meeting basic human needs like food and water, and integral to meeting modern desires for mobility, energy, and consumer-products on demand. This class approaches the modern world¿s increasingly-reluctant reliance on oil¿from extraction to consumption with problems included¿as a complex cultural practice to be analyzed using anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.

2019-2020 Spring

ANTHRO 185:Medical Anthropology of Contemporary Africa (ANTHRO 285)

In this course we will examine the place of Africa in global health discourses while reading in-depth histories and ethnographies of the varied causes and consequences of some of the most difficult problems facing African countries today. We will study the effects of colonialism and conflict on health, explore the military and humanitarian connections in the fight against HIV/AIDS, weigh the risks and benefits of population genetic studies on African populations, examine biomedical interventions on, and erasures of, local health problems, and query the role of violence, memory, insecurity, and power in daily life on the continent.

Last offered: Winter 2014

ANTHRO 185A:Race and Biomedicine (ASNAMST 185A)

Race, identity, culture, biology, and political power in biomedicine. Biological theories of racial ordering, sexuality and the medicalization of group difference. Sources include ethnography, film, and biomedical literature. Topics include colonial history and medicine, the politics of racial categorization in biomedical research, the protection of human subjects and research ethics, immigration health and citizenship, race-based models in health disparities research and policy, and recent developments in human genetic variation research.